Mindfulness and Critical Friendship: A New Perspective on Professional Development for Educators assembles an international community of scholar-practitioners from multiple disciplines who utilize different methodologies and ideological perspectives to reflect on and interrogate contexts that situate mindfulness and critical friendship as constructs which support professional development for educators. Mindfulness and critical friendship connect critically and creatively like-minded collea...

This text articulates how and why suffering can be pedagogical in character and how it is often key to authentic and meaningful acts of teaching and learning. This is an ancient idea from the Greek tragedies of Aeschylus (c. 525 BCE) – pathei mathos or «learning through suffering». In our understandable rush to ameliorate suffering at every turn and to consider every instance of it as an error to be avoided at all costs, we explore how the pedagogy that can come from suffering bec...